'From the rim of the farthest circle'.

Bazin, Claire

'Janet Frame has always written from the position of the other. Her perspective is that of the outsider, the marginalised, the oppressed and the repressed.' (2)

The title of this essay comes from the first volume of Janet Frame's autobiographical trilogy, a story of exclusion in all its forms. Frame, the daughter of a poor railway worker, is ostracised at school where the prestigious Group dominates, imposing the literary tastes which are but the reflection of the fashions which enslave it: 'This group was the core of the class with their activities at home and at school the source of most of the class interest and news; the rest of us moved on the outside in more or less distant concentric circles' (I: 117). This image echoes one also found in Frame's autobiographical novel Faces in the Water (1961)--which she herself calls 'documentary fiction' (3)--where each mental ward is likened to one of Dante's infernal circles. At school, Janet had already suffered under the exclusionary label of thief for having stolen money from her father to buy chewing gum for her classmates (which could be read as a re-writing of a scene in Jane Eyre) and we know that--as Wilde put it--'from a label there is no escape'. (4)

Frame's dilemma or existential paradox is her desperate quest to integrate, be it into the Group or any other form of community, while simultaneously despising such conformist communities. As a child she is rejected because of her social status, her different physical appearance (in particular her bushy red hair) and her shyness which verges on the pathological--to the point that she will spend eight years of her life in psychiatric hospitals, that difference having been diagnosed as schizophrenia. Paradoxical and even incredible though it may seem, that schizophrenia helps Janet to become the famous writer she was, as if in a quasi-frightening appropriation of the illness she had managed to transform it, making it into the magical instrument or ally of her creativity. The 'mad woman' has become an artist thanks to her madness. As Jean-Jacques Lecercle puts it in an article on Foucault and Frame, Frame was a writer before being 'mad' and then became a writer on madness. (5)

This essay follows a chronological pattern and explores the central metaphor suggested by its title. From exclusion at school and at home, from a hardly bearable position, Frame manages to reach 'the centre', gaining an international reputation thanks to her writing about the margins--from social and mental exclusion to final inclusion through fame.

History and her story: geographical and personal rim/oteness.

Janet Frame's itinerary reflects her country's. Although Gina Mercer (certainly exaggeratedly) claims that 'in global terms, New Zealand is as remote and unconsidered culturally as it is geographically', (6) as if insularity were the corollary of isolation, it is significant that Janet's father's farewell words, the day before her departure for Europe, should be, to Janet's astonishment, 'So you are going home' (II: 188). This 'home' will prove as unwelcoming and as inhospitable to Janet as her own native land. Her arrival in London actualises the feeling of total estrangement in a country that is not hers and which doesn't correspond with the favourable mental image she had before her arrival: 'St John's Wood, Swiss Cottage, Hampstead Heath, Earl's Court--names then unknown, romantically enticing, but now seeming like stark cliff faces without hand or foothold, inhospitality plunging me into the dark unknown.' (7) (III: 18) Janet herself, though eager to discover Great Britain, has never regarded it as Home: I was startled. I had never heard him call the northern hemisphere borne; he usually laughed at people who still talked of the United Kingdom as Home; [...] I realised suddenly that my father's use of the word 'home' was [...] a dislike of appearing different. (III: 189)

Like father, like daughter, although distance, like difference, is in the eye of the beholder: for Janet, Europe is remote--'on the rim of the farthest circle'; the choice of the polysemic 'rim' invites the interpretation. Janet's life predicament is herself to be regarded as remote, as 'other'--a difference that was only herself, as she later brings herself to accept. To sum up Helene Cixous's theory, 'otherness is never to be tolerated as such', but has to be absorbed in similarity. (8) This is what happens in the psychiatric hospital, to a frightful and frightening degree.

When World War II breaks out, it has no reality for Frame: it takes place elsewhere, (9) even if Frame is sensitive to the fever that takes hold of the whole town on the declaration of war. What strikes her is the emergence of a new language--an experience to be reiterated at the psychiatric hospital--as if each particular place or event had a language of its own that one has to learn and adapt to, a kind of newspeak. The language of war turns men into 'boys' again in a process of infantilisation that is also the lot of patients in psychiatric hospitals, though the war returns 'boys' to childhood 'with a license to kill' (I: 152). (In all her writings, Frame insists on the fact that children and 'mental patients' are treated the same way, as if they don't have a self of their own.) The war, or war fever, takes hold of Janet's imagination to a limited extent--she writes a few mediocre poems on the subject but she and her sisters tend to reduce it to a farce with a main actor called Hitler: "We mimicked his raving delivery, the Nazi salute, and the goose-stepping armies' (I: 137). In retrospect, it is the idea of the reduction of a whole people to nobodies with the mad person--Hitler--left free which comes to have more reality for her in that it anticipates a painful identification, and also forms the subject of her novel The Adaptable Man (1965). She assumes the very term 'nobodies' into her self-definition (or ironical absence of definition): 'I was a nothing, a nobody' (II: 110)--a sort of impossible enunciation as in Lecercle's analysis of Frankenstein's monster, in that the subject states an existence that denies itself in the very act and at the very moment of enunciation. (10)

The war brings with it the discovery of racism. Frame's history teacher strongly adheres to the concept of the purity of the white race--intermarriage of races, she says, produces 'an inferior "type'" (I: 137)--proleptically echoing the warnings of Patrick Reilly, the ridiculous Irishman she meets in London and her 'conformist New Zealand conscience' (III: 105) who watches over all her movements and disapproves of her too 'daring' career or sexual choices, who is also a master of the art of the cliche. 'Watch out for the blacks in London', he says, repeating the inescapable labels of racism. 'They are everywhere. They're stealing all the work. [...] They're lower than us. They are the blacks' (III: 25). Janet had already had a taste of racism when she first heard the word 'half-caste', used by her father as a qualifier to identify the daughter of one of his friends, as if she were less than her father, who is himself 'full-blooded' (I: 67).

Janet, then, is not alone on the rim of the farthest circle, that, like the rubbish dump in Owls Do Cry, seems to contain all the cast-offs and refuse of the world. In his Histoire de la Folie, Foucault has shown that exclusion and isolation were not reserved for the mad alone, but also for the poor, for criminals and for libertines: those who do not play the game or abide by the rules. As David Le Breton has elsewhere noted, 'one's body must be absorbed in the dominant codes and each one must be able to find in his interlocutors, as in a mirror, his own bodily attitudes and a familiar image'. (11) A different body is a stranger with whom it is impossible to identify; the failure of identification opens the way to racism.

Janet's personal story is a story of difference. Her hair, for example, is a constant source of worry for one whose main aim was to remain invisible: 'I did my best to smooth the surface of life, to be, in a sense, invisible' (II: 122). Her 'frizzy red hair "up like a bush" with everyone remarking on it' (I: 82) refuses to conform, again echoing Jane Eyre, in which the charity girls are not allowed to have curly hair, as if it were a disease--Brocklehurst calls it an 'excrescence'--that had to be cured with radical amputation. (12) On a few occasions, for example at the end of Volume II, before she meets the writer Sillitoe, Janet tries in vain to have it ironed out--'to smooth the surface of life' (II: 122). As Tonya Blowers has noted, hair has always taken on cultural significance as a symbol of difference, having been employed 'to represent idealised versions of class, race and gender both by the dominant and the oppressed'. (13) If Janet's hair is the epitome of her otherness--'l'identite tient a un cheveu'(14)--her body in general preys on her mind. For example, her 'legs like railway sleepers' (III: 74) inscribe her father's job on her body; they are also a severe obstacle on the marriage market. Janet is also ashamed of the dirtiness for which she is condemned by the school doctor. During the school games nobody wants to form twos with her: 'I concluded I stank' (1: 164). In Framian terms, the body is on the side of this world--the hic et nunc--whereas the mind belongs to that world: the world of the imagination, Mirror City. Reconciliation seems impossible.

Few women, says Mercer, have talked so much and so openly about their bodies, (15) although the French feminist critic Luce Irigaray has noted that women autobiographers do so much more often than men, on the assumption that men are under far less social pressure in regards bodily matters (16)--'bodies that matter', to echo Judith Butler's suggestive title. Frame avoids the usual 'strategies of avoidance' (17) she denounces in matters of taboo (for example sex, illness and death) and reintroduces them with a vengeance. Her growing body increases her torment as it no longer fits her too-tight school tunic. This becomes an obsession, as the repeated references to it testify, and a proleptic echo of the never-mentioned but constantly-feared straight jacket. Her school uniform is only 'almost correct' (I: 106) with two pleats instead of the customary three, so instead of playing its role as an eraser of difference the uniform does nothing but underline it. It feels like a prison--far more so than the bra her mother says would impose restrictions on her body (although this is only a pretext for the fact that she cannot afford to buy one). Clothes are indicators of one's social status--'they are crucial symbols of wealth, femininity and belonging'(18)--and it is significant that the last chapter of Volume I should end with clothes. Janet dreads the future, which is synonymous with the purchase of many articles of clothing she cannot afford, and she feels entitled to prune the most unattainable 'fruits' from the terrifying teachers' college list as if it enumerated the desirable but poisonous apples of Eden (or of Hell). Even the school tunic she has grown to hate seems preferable to all these new clothes, anticipating her gradual appropriation of her schizophrenia, which also becomes a second skin, her 'schizophrenic fancy dress' (II: 81)--a dangerous but ultimately blessed protection for Janet.

Schizophrenia acts as a protective delusion. Frame, the writer, pictures her younger self, the persona of the autobiographies, playing the part of the perfect 'textbook schizophrenic' (II: 81) in her efforts to win the approval--not to say the love--of John Forrest, while secretly laughing at the man who so easily (so naively, should we say?) fell into the trap she laid for him: I built up a formidable schizophrenic repertoire: I'd lie on the couch while the young handsome John Forrest, glistening with newly-applied Freud, took note of what I said and did, and suddenly I'd put a glazed look in my eye, as if I were in a dream, and begin to related a fantasy as if I experienced it as a reality. (II: 79)(19)

When the diagnosis of schizophrenia is invalidated in London, Janet feels as naked as when she had had to give up her school tunic, 'like a skinned rabbit' (1: 171). As if illustrating the double meaning alluded to in Didier Anzieu's title Le Moi-peau, Frame's 'clothing' had become a 'self-hide'. (20) She had lost her protection, her comfort, and her identity in the refuge which had also become a trap. The 'asylum' she had sought was both.

The Farthest Circle

Although Janet's love of words begins when she is very young, she simultaneously discovers that words can be traitors too. If her early experiences of this betrayal are rather anecdotal and comic--a visit to the dentist where she is told to 'smell the pretty pink towel' and is put to sleep (1: 29); the misleading phrase 'permanent wave'--they become tragic when the professors invite her to 'have a few days' rest' (II: 64) after an essay written at university imprudently reveals her attempt at suicide. (Hence her procrastinating over writing her official autobiography, and her feelings of legitimate mistrust of the autobiographical genre.) The diagnosis falls like a death sentence--'You've got Shizzofreenier' (II: 72)--although the spelling distortion may also be the sign of a liberation: we could go so far as to hear 'she's so free', as if the condemnation contained its own redemption. The illness, no matter how terrible, radical and 'with no cure' (11: 73) it may appear, is also the sign of genius. (Janet's mother, similarly, has kept encouraging Bruddie with the thought that he might be a genius in disguise, since, like Julius Caesar, he suffers from epilepsy.) Frame will achieve the 'tour de force' of making her illness a powerful ally in her artistic creation. Instead of hating a difference that has cost her her freedom, almost depriving her of her identity since she only very, narrowly escapes a lobotomy, Frame welcomes it, courts it, wears it: 'I would wear my mantle of difference with pride' (I: 136), as if it were a prestigious suit of clothes for 'an ordinary grey-feathered bird' (II: 81). Difference, here marked as 'illness', can confer originality and distinction: 'I would endow my work, and--when necessary--my life with the mark of my schizophrenia' (II: 79). The 'gift of the loss' (III: 19) of the illness is a new identity--a boon which enables her to resume her own words when she arrives in London with nowhere to go because her letter has not reached its destination: Standing with my luggage on the grimy London steps I felt fleetingly at the back of my mind the perennial drama of the Arrival and its place in myth and fiction, and I again experienced the thrilling sense of being myself excavated as reality, the ore of polished fiction. (III: 19)

Frame's living/survival talent is to transform catastrophes into artistic experiences through the alchemy of creativity, a gift she feels she owes to her mother. In the case of 'Shizzophrenia' the freedom suggested by the wrong spelling is, however, only a matter of spelling, as the illness does send her to Seacliff 'where the loonies went' (II: 65) as the first step towards the descent into hell she relates in Faces in the Water, as if truth were easier to relate in the guise of fiction.

The autobiography is elliptical about the stays in psychiatric hospitals. Here the rim is even more 'fartherized', and Janet even more ostracized: 'hospitals', says Gina Mercer, 'are protective not of the mentally ill but of the patriarchal, materialist society which predominates'. (21) In Maladie Mentale et Psyhologie, Foucault calls the separation of the world of the mentally sane and the world of the mad a 'binary separation' and a 'caesura'. (22) This clear-cut

pattern is based on the division between those who conform and those who don't (and the latter have to pay a higher price for it). Faces in the Water gives access to a world built in concentric circles which duplicate Dante's inferno in their inexorability. The 'worse' one becomes, the further one descends--the rim may be the rim of a bottomless well--and the further one descends the worse one becomes in a frightful vicious spiralling movement. Frame develops this vision in Intensive Care (1970), in which her social satire reaches a peak: the State categorizes people as humans or animals, and patients are treated like animals, powerfully echoing both Brave New World and the Nazi ideology she laughs at via its main representative, Hitler. This confirms Mercer's theory: hospitals protect a society that is terrified of a possible resemblance between the mad and the others. According to Foucault, it is the refusal of the sane to acknowledge--or their fear of acknowledging--their common humanity that leads them to relegate the mad to the margins of society to places where the they will be kept 'safe' and unable to contaminate them. (The first mad woman in literature is locked up in an attic by her husband, Rochester, who contemplates sealing up the house for fear of contamination: 'that demon's vicinage is poisoned'. (23)) For Foucault, marking a division between sanity and madness aims to preserve sanity from the part of madness that is within each of us. If Mr Hyde is a source of disgust in Stephenson's Strange Case, it is because he is too much like any ordinary man, but with a difference. And difference must be excluded, even eradicated. Lobotomy is the panacea, making the ill brain a tabula rasa on which society can inscribe its rules without opposition: 'the patients were retrained to fit in' (II: 109); after her lobotomy, Frame's friend Nola is 'docile' (II: 109). Body and mind are territories to be conquered by the colonizing staff. The hospital is like a prison, a concentration camp, or even a huge coffin. In Faces in the Water patients wear 'the uniform of the dead', (24) echoing Daphne, the heroine of Owls do Cry, who sings from the dead room; the choice of the word 'uniform' also suggests a further parallel between children and patients. 'Few people have had advance glimpses of their coffin; if they did, they might be tempted to charm it into preserving in the satin lining a few trinkets of their identity.' (25) The electro-convulsive therapy sessions Janet undergoes are equivalent, in degree of fear, to an execution (II: 109).

How did Janet Frame survive in an environment in which, although she was not mad (as she was told later, and which she says she had always known), she could easily have become mad? In the autobiography, in which she chooses to emphasise the periods out of hospital, she insists on her (frightful) will to adapt to this new environment, her new 'adopted country': 'I who had learned the language of the mad, spoke and acted the language' (II: 95). Janet becomes 'she, one of them' (II: 70) as if her 'shadowy I' (II: 27) were but an empty shape waiting to be filled with an identity, whatever that identity might be: better mad than nothing. Janet, the character in the autobiography (but maybe also her creator in so far as the two are sometimes one and the same in autobiography) resorts to madness as a protective screen--a refuge behind which her creativity can blossom. However dangerous a trick this may prove--it first relegates her to the furthest margins of society--it eventually rewards her with fame, bringing her to the centre from which she had been banished.

Portrait of the mad woman as artist

Frame's talent emerged early. Her childhood passion for words developed into her hunger for books, literalized in the eating of the Christmas icing: 'words that could be eaten' (I: 96). She makes an epiphanic discovery in a borrowed copy of Grimm's fairy tales: 'the world of reading and the world of living became linked in a way I had not noticed before' (I: 54). She wants to become a poet, claiming her right to choose her own words over the more commonly used ones--the words Myrtle affirms 'you had to use': 'I reverted to "touch the sky", having it my own way' (I: 83). Frame claims the supremacy of parole (the sign of individuality) over langue (the collective). Her rebellion is through language. Her love of Shakespeare, for example, is not spontaneous, as she first thought of him as a 'rite of passage', or, more severely, as 'a bore' (1: 141). It is only thanks to Miss Farnie that she becomes 'converted' to him (1: 141), as if she had only needed the right key to decipher his words. Her love extends to 19th century authors with whom she can identify, either through their heroines or in their personal lives--bio and graphy--the Brontes being the most eloquent example: Gradually I was acquiring an image of myself as a person apart from myself as a poet, and in my reading I identified most easily with the stoical solitary heroine suffering in silence, the 'plain Jane.' [...] Yet I was also Tess [...] as I had once been [...] Charlotte Bronte. I was Maggie Tullilver and Jane Eyre and Cathy. (I: 157)

Not unlike Jane Eyre, who despises her cousin John Reed for his ugliness and stupidity, Frame is not unaware (to put it euphemistically) of her intellectual superiority. When she gets a job at the Grand Hotel, she honestly (autobiographically and 'Rousseauistically') confides to the reader that she was 'inclined to adopt the air of a secret princess among the scullions' (11: 117). The diagnosis of 'peculiarity' develops its bisemantism. As Janet's mother had predicted, as she had spent years trying to convince her epileptic son, peculiarity can be equated with genius. She could be one of the Romantic 'mad artists' whose ability was apparently 'the pearl of their schizophrenia' (II: 79). Her mother was right. Mothers always are. The Princess had already written The Lagoon and Other Stories (1951), the collection that would literally (and literarily) save her life: 'it is no wonder I value literature as a way of life, since it actually saved my life' (II: 106). Frame the author is also the author of her own life, a life she created (or re-created) through words. She creates herself via the construction of her literary doubles: Janet, the heroine of the autobiography, and Istina in Faces in the Water or Daphne in Owls Do Cry, her carbon copies. Hers is a story of love of words, but of words of her own rather than the words imposed on her by external instances or by 'expert bullies' (III: 144), as the psychiatrist in London calls the former deciders about her life. It is paradoxical, however, that the very same psychiatrist should advise her to write her story--which is to become Faces in the Water, a fictionalised version of her hospital life (or death?)--as if he, too, were another of the deciders he so strongly condemns, the difference being that his advice does coincide with her own desire to write.

The rim is no longest the farthest: she leaves it to occupy the centre of the New Zealand literary landscape. Though she had been rejected and almost destroyed by her own country, Frame in turn inscribes it on the world's literary map: My reason for returning was literary. Europe was so much on the map of the imagination (which is a limitless map, indeed) with room for anyone who cares to find a place there [...] yet the prospect of exploring a new country with not so many layers of mapmakers, particularly the country where one first saw daylight [...] was too tantalizing to resist. It is possible to be a mapmaker for those who will follow. [...] (III: 166)

Tonya Blowers has suggested that Frame chose New Zealand, 'this geographical and literary periphery', as the ideal place for her fiction 'simply because it is less explored less known and therefore there is more scope for the imagination. [...] New Zealand has become "a blank state".' (26) Although this analysis may have some merit, it is also a little reductive in that Blowers seems to forget that there is no place like home, and that home is definitely not Great Britain. Rousseau noted that the person one knows best is oneself, which may be extended to one's own country; Georges Gusdorf's observation that 'the path that leads to oneself goes round about the world' is also relevant here. (27) The return of the native, 'the prodigal Janet' who became a famous author with an international reputation especially thanks to the autobiography and the film based on it, helps in the process of reconstruction which started 'away from home', with herself as herself (III: 129), no longer in need of the protection of an illness she knows she never suffered from.

Notes

(1) Janet Frame, To the Is-Land (London: Paladin, 1987), p. 117. Subsequent references to Frame's autobiographical trilogy are as follows: (1) To The Is-Land (1982) (London: Paladin, 1987); (II) An Angel at My Table (1984) (London: Paladin, 1987); (III) The Envoy from Mirror City (1984) (London: Paladin, 1987).

(2) Gina Mercer, Janet Frame: Subversive Fictions (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1994), p. 8.

(3) Janet Frame, Faces in the Water (1961), (London: the Women's Press, 1980), Preface.

(4) Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), (New York, London: Norton, 1988), p.149.

(5) Jean-Jacques Lecercle, 'Folie et Litterature: De Foucault a Janet Frame', La Licorne 55 (2001), 301-303.

(6) Mercer, p. 8.

(7) The echo to Seacliff psychiatric hospital is obvious here.

(8) Helene Cixous, 'Sorties: Out &Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays' in H. Cixous and C. Clement, The Newly Born Woman, (1975), (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 1986), p. 70. Quoted in Mercer, p. 253.

(9) The long and sickening boat trip Frame later undertakes gives the full measure of the distance separating the two continents. As she insists on her arrival in London, she has come 'all the way from New Zealand' (III: 18).

(10) See Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Frankenstein: mythe et philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988).

(11) David Le Breton, Anthropologie du Corps et Modernite (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), p. 139. 'Le corps doit se resorber dans les codes en vigueur et chacun doit pouvoir retrouver chez ses interlocuteurs, comme dans un miroir, ses propres attitudes corporelles et une image qui ne le surprenne pas.'

(12) Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, (1847), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 96.

(13) Tonya Blowers, Locating the Self: Re-reading Autobiography as Theory and Practice, with particular reference to the writing of Janet Frame. (PhD Dissertation: University. of Warwick, 1998), p. 80.

(14) 'Identity depends on one's hair.' The pun is more eloquent in French.

(15) Mercer, p. 228.

(16) Luce Irigaray, 'This Sex Which is Not One', in New French Feminisms, ed. by E. Marks and I. de Courtivron (Harvester Press: Sussex, 1981), pp. 100-103.

(17) Mercer, p. 12.

(18) Blowers, p. 77.

(19) We could of course see a pun in the choice of 'lie.'

(20) Didier Anzieu, Le Moi-peau, (Paris: Dunod, 1985).

(21) Mercer, p. 78.

(22) Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et psychologie, (1954), (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 2002), p. 93.

(23) Jane Eye, p. 328.

(24) Faces in the Water, p.186. My italics.

(25) Faces in the Water, p. 24.

(26) Blowers, p. 91.

(27) Georges Gusdorf, Les Eoitures du moi (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991) p. 8. 'Le chemin qui mene de soi a soi fait le tour du monde.'